Hacker News Reader

Comment by pier25 | Hacker News Reader

How can X become a super app when it can't even be a social media and chat app right?

Aggressive lock-in and positioning their conglomerate's holdings to be blocks to conducting normal activity in society via any competitor.

How about I flood your whole city with robotaxi cars and make it cost a nickel a mile, but you must be an X account holder, must use the X app, must pay in X-coin, and must submit to whatever other perverse encapsulation Lord Musk decides to implement. How about I only carry X-related data over my global net of satellites, forcing most connected people to buy from my ISP, must pay in X-coin but it also only costs 20 bucks a month. On and on, it seems pretty transparent to me.

It's all a furious and cynical land-grab in preparation for a very dystopian future.

Yea but competitors (Apple, Meta, Google, etc.) are better across the board and they would be able to provide alternatives or prevent these activities.

> How about I only carry X-related data over my global net of satellites

Just cherry-picking this one but, but it would get regulated and competitors would come on to the market, and you can also obtain service from traditional providers (ISPs, and mobile providers) like you do today.

Also you can see how well these items work now ala Apple (maybe Google too?). Apple Card, iCloud, iPhone, Car Play, etc. good luck competing with that when people actively hate your products lol. I'm not super worried about this. I'm much more concerned about something like disinformation campaigns on social media or something along those lines than I am any sort of competence with Twitter turning into a dystopian nightmare machine.

Is he going to make an "X" account required to operate a Tesla? Sort of like what Microsoft is trying to do with Windows 11, or Facebook did with the Oculus.

You get in your car to drive to the store, but it demands you makes several public posts about how great the car is before letting you go to the store or exit the car.

Original lore: http://ibgwww.colorado.edu/~lessem/psyc5112/usail/library/hu...

Honestly this sounds like it would end up being a net negative.

The US or the EU are not China. People generally don't accept being forced to do things and I wonder about the legality of it all.

> It's all a furious and cynical land-grab in preparation for a very dystopian future

But in this scenario Twitter is like Vanuatu planning world domination. They have absolutely no leverage to compel anbody to sign up for a Twitter account. Musk would need to spend significanty more money to do any of this, and frankly, I feel like he will spend the coming year being an election provocateur than do anything productive.

You nailed the killer question. That leads to all sorts of thinking about brand management and the skills of the person at the top.

Twitter had the same level of brand recognition that google has. Musk threw that away for a bad rebrand. He just wrecked a company out of spite, or ignorance.

It's surprising he didn't do his own social media to try and outflank them on features from the ground up. It would have been cheaper too.

I think the point is that if he can pivot to do all the other things, then the social media will follow. However, the markets that he wants to get into require a high degree of customer trust--and I'm thinking he doesn't have much of that left.

Banking and social posting are at odds with one another, at least in countries where people feel they can express themselves unreservedly. In China it works as people are conditioned not to do that.

Unless he aims for influencer branding and consumption of curated content [1] and not the free expression of unpopular opinion, then it's a very cold and one dimensional target market. It's the opposite of what Twitter once was - brief musings thrown into the wind. Instead, people will consciously and deliberately pander to an audience for subs, views, and income. It'll no-longer be a platform for casual, jokey, sarcastic fluff, or raw, honest, and radical perspectives.

[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/social-media-dead-instagram-...

It can't; it's pure fantasy.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com